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IT industry leaders are banding together to spur development of a super-energy efficient processor. The goal of the Green Touch project is a processor that cuts the energy used for information processing and networking by a factor of 1,000, reports ComputerWeekly.

The project is the brainchild of Bell Labs, which is forming a consortium to bring a solution to market within five years. Companies involved in the consortium will build a so-called reference architecture, or model, of the technologies and methods that IT can use to decrease energy consumption.

In achieving the goal, Vicente San Miguel, CTO of Telefónica, one of the consortium members, said that the IT industry could save the equivalent of 7.8GTn of CO2, or 15 percent of the total world emissions predicted by 2020, reports ComputerWeekly.

Or, put another way, a 1,000-fold reduction in IT energy use would mean being able to power the world’s communications networks, including the Internet, for nearly three years using the same amount of energy that it currently uses in one day.

Other founding members of Green Touch are AT&T, China Mobile, Samsung, Freescale Semiconductor, Swisscom, Portugal Telecom, MIT, Stanford University, University of Melbourne. Government and non-profit participants are CEA-LETI, Imec and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control.

Green Touch will hold its first meeting in February, reports CNNMoney.

About 28 percent of major companies are implementing a comprehensive plan for green IT practices and technologies, part of a rising trend, according to a survey.

Without major advances in energy efficiency, U.S. energy consumption is projected to grow 14 percent from 2008 to 2035.